myBase Desktop 7.x ChangeLog

Version 7.3

Added: support of MathJax for Markdown; The online (CDN) version of MathJax is used by default.
If you already have a local copy of the MathJax library extracted in the file system,
the folder location can be specified in the [Options - Content] dialog box to enable the local copy for speed up;

Added: the Lock screen feature; The lock screen can show up to keep the user interface hidden after being idle for a few minutes or the main window minimized,
and a passcode can be set in the [Options - General] dialog box for user authentication on unlocking the user interface.

Added: in the attachment pane, an option to paste image data from clipboard as .png attachments;

Added: in Markdown/Html/Rich content editor, ability to paste image data from clipboard to first create .png attachments and then insert the image links;

Added: in Paste special dialogue, an option to specify a filename to save image data as attachment file;
In the case that only image with no other data applicable in clipboard, Paste special is the default action on pressing Ctlr+V or Command+V,
so you can choose the method saving the image data; This behaviour can be disabled in the [Options - Prompt] dialogue.

Added: ability to insert images to HTML/Rich/Markdown contents by dragging from in attachments pane;

Added: support of html format in the plugin utility [Edit - Insert - Insert quick text], as long as quick text are precedingly saved as .q.html files;

Added: a file utility to help make incremental backup of local disk folders based on file names, sizes and timestamps;

Added: for the Mac version, a symbolic link to /Applications added into the .dmg package for the convenience of installation by dragging-dropping;

Bugfix: a fix to make the History menu open up much faster than ever before;

Bugfix: in Markdown editor, hyperlinks and images with titles specified not syntax-highlighted;

Bugfix: a different doc-type may incidentally be set when pressing Enter key immediately after the new doc-type is chosen;

Minor changes;

Version 7.0.0 Beta-27

Added: new content editors for rich/plain text editings; For each new info items, the default content can be initialized in either of the 4 document formats (HTML, Rich Text, Plain Text and Markdown);
and the HTML editor, Rich text editor and Plain text editor are integrated for inplace editing of item contents;
Comparing with the HTML editor handling web contents/layouts well, the rich/plain text editors are more effective and efficient for simple word processing and text editing;
The rich/plain text editors also support syntax-highlighting of source code with 20 familiar programming languages supported for now;

Enhancement: efforts on making almost all existing plugins and utilities compatible with the newly added 3 document formats;

Plugin: Edit - Change content type, which allows to change default item content to one of supported formats (HTML, Rich, Plain or Markdown) by selecting an applicable attachment or creating a new document;
The old item content (if existing) will be preserved and renamed as an ordinary attachment file;

Plugin: Share - Export page as image, which helps save the current content as an image file;

Plugin: Share - Export PDF document, which helps save the current content as a PDF document;

Enhancement: allows to change font name/size/colors for currently focused views/panes by simply using the main toolbar, without having to open the Preference/Options dialog box;

Enhancement: with in the outline view having input focus, selecting the Font name/size/colors from the main toolbar with the Ctrl or Shift key held down, it applies to the currently selected info items individually; By default, without Ctrl or Shift key modifiers, it changes the default display attributes of outline tree;

Enhancement: allows to set custom style for individual info items by using user-defined stylesheets;

Enhancement: allows to keep the last visited items in the config file and restore the history menu at next open;

Bugfix: on Mac, the applied labels on the content header bar may flicker while typing in the HTML editor;

Bugfix: on Mac, the shortcut key Command+delete is implicitly pre-defined by WebKit as the Go Back command, that can cause the current contents to suddenly disappear in the HTML editor;

Bugfix: on Windows, it may crash on saving huge HTML contents with length of 80MiB+ in a single document; Avoid inputing 80+MiB in a single HTML document;

Bugfix: hyperlinks to bookmarks inside the same document not working after exported; Applies to Share - Export HTML Tree & Export HTML content;

Minor changes;

Version 7.0.0 Beta-26

Enhancement: more extensive and sophisticated syntax highlighting feature integrated. No matter whether source code are inserted as snippets in text contents,
or inserted as attachments, they will be automatically highlighted when opening. Currently 168 programming languages and 80 styles are supported.
Plus, source code snippets embedded in Markdown .md attachments will also be highlighted automatically when opening.
With in the Options - Content dialog box, there're 80 different styles available to choose for render source code snippets;
Tab characters in source code will be replaced with a series of blank spaces; You can customize Tab width in the Options - Edit dialog box

Plugin: Edit - Insert code block: which allows to insert a code block into the current text content;
Source code contained in the code block will be automatically syntax-highlighted in the language you specify

Added: an option to enable mouse wheel for content area to zoom in/out. Use Ctrl+Wheel on Windows and Linux, Command+Wheel on Mac

Added: a prompt window to confirm whether to discard changes when pressing Esc with in the 'Edit plain text' window

Bugfix: it may crash on Pasting special with no RTF contents available in clipboard

Minor changes;

Version 7.0.0 Beta-25

Add-on: new version of Webcollect addon for Google Chrome (Linux, MacOSX, Windows), which allows to capture webpages (or snippets) from Google Chrome and save into the current database;
To install the new version Webcollect addon, select the 'Tools - Install Webcollect Host for Chrome' menu item,
then proceed to Google Chrome WebStore and add Webcollect addon to your Chrome web browser;
Once the installation completes, you will find the 'Save with myBase 7.x' menu item when right-clicking on a webpage.
By default, it tries to save entire webpages; In order to save a portion of a webpage, try to first highlight the portion;
Note that the new version webcollect is now available for Linux, MacOSX and Windows, and works with myBase 7.0 Beta-25 or later,
but not compatible with earlier versions of myBase, since Google Chrome 45+ removed the NPAPI interface,
and old versions of myBase have no idea of how the new Webcollect transmits web contents.

Add-on: new version of Webcollect addon for Mozilla Firefox (Linux, MacOSX, Windows), which allows to capture webpages (or snippets) from Mozilla Firefox and save into the current database;
To install the new version Webcollect addon, navigate to Firefox AMO and add Webcollect addon to your Firefox web browser;
Once the installation completes, you will find the 'Save with myBase 7.x' menu item when right-clicking on webpages.
By default, it tries to save entire webpages; In order to save a portion of a webpage, try to first highlight the portion;
Note that the new version webcollect is now available for Linux, MacOSX and Windows, and works with myBase 7.0 Beta-25 or later,
but not compatible with earlier versions of myBase,
as old versions have no idea of how the new Webcollect transmits web contents.

Enhancement: added an option to disable the Find-as-you-type feature, so you can press Enter to start searching after typing a find string

Enhancement: in the outline/lable tree view, pressing Left arrow key collapses the current item (branch) if it is expanded, otherwise, jump to its parent item if applicable; And pressing Right arrow key expands the current item (branch) if it has child items and is collapsed

Enhancement: added the Find/replace panel under the HTML content area for the convenience of finding/replacing/highlighting text in the HTML editor

Enhancement: minor tweaks for less confirmation alerts when searching with outdated index data

Enhancement: added an option to auto-detect regular expressions with in the Advanced search form and Search as-you-type toolbar; If a search phrase is typed in with a pair of forward-slashes surrounded,
and optionally with an lower case 'i' followed, like this: /pattern/ or /pattern/i, it'll be recognized as a RegExp when running the query, the optional lower case 'i' indicates ignoring case when matching text.
If you search RegExp with this option disabled, you will need to manually check the 'Regular expressions' radio-button from in the Advanced search form to explicitly set it as RegExp;
If the 'Regular expressions' radio-button is checked, the surrounding forward-slashes can be omitted, but one thing, it's nowhere to apply the 'i' option, it by default seaches without case.
Generally, it's recommended that you always have the 'Auto-detection of RegExp' option enabled, and type RegExp with a pair of forward-slashes surrounded, this way,
searches are case-sensitive, and the 'i' option can be used to ignore case; The 'Auto-detection of RegExp' also take effects with the Search as-you-type toolbar.

Enhancement: ability to paste RTF text into the HTML editor from other Windows applications

Minor changes and bugfixes

Version 7.0.0 Beta-24

Improvement: in the search/tag results list, keyboard navigation is now enabled, the Up/Down arrow key moves the current selection,
and the Enter/Space key triggers the currently selected result item

Improvement: on the content header bar, an advanced location bar is added, which displays location of the current content
and allows to navigate through child/sibling items by using dropdown menus; The advanced location bar can be disabled from in the Options dialog box

Improvement: for consistency of contents of attachments externally opened, any changes made to the attachments
within external applications will be actively captured and imported into the database.
And pressing the Save button attempts to capture external changes again (if changed since last capture)
in case of failure capturing the external changes when the document has the exclusive open mode with external applications.
For each successful capture of external changes, that will be saved as a new revision and trash the previous revision.
If the file has been saved multiple times within external applications, it would produce the same number of revisions within the database

Improvement: for convenience of making hyperlinks in HTML editor, it tries to detect and extract an url from selected text and initialize the link field with the url in the dialog box

Plugin: Detect text encoding, which tries to detect and then display the encoding type of a given text file

Plugin: View file in hexadecimal, which shows contents of a file in the specified range in the hexadecimal format

Plugin: Export current content as a .html document, with images embedded into the resulting HTML document in the base64 data format

Plugin: Open current content/attachment externally with associated applications, external changes will be automatically captured and saved into the database

Bugfix: the & character not shown on menus

Bugfix: UTF-8 text files without BOM not working; This fix scans the given character sequence in a file and tries to detect if it is possibly encoded in UTF-8

Bugfix: the hotkey Ctrl+C (Copy selected HTML contents) not working with embedded images

Bugfix: attachments named the '#' character not working; For URLs, the '#' is a special character; it's not recommended to use '#' in any file names especially when the filenames are used/linked with in HTML contents

Bugfix: in the image gallery view, applying label and calendar not working properly

Bugfix: during drag operations, the dragging image may overlook 'duplicate' items which have the same titles

Bugfix: item-links may not work in generated CHM ebooks

Version 7.0.0 Beta-23

Added: the 'Relative path variables' feature

This feature allows to define a list of variables of folder locations and create hyperlinks/shortcuts linking to documents inside the folders with the variables automatically applied;
Values of the relative path variables can be re-assigned to help maintain consistency of the file links in case of any changes of the folder locations, without having to modify or recreate all existing hyperlinks and shortcuts;

For convenience, a few variables have been predefined for the common directories;
For example, ${HOME} stands for the current user's home directory, ${DB} for the directory where the current .nyf database file resides, and ${TEMP} the system-defined temporary folder location;
Therefore, a typical file link with relative path would be like this 'file:///${HOME}/sub/dir/filename.suffix' when you insert a file link or shortcut from in the home directory,
or 'file:///${DB}/sub/dir/filename.suffix' if in the .nyf database folder.

So you may want to define additional variables to substitute for other particular folder locations; For example, ${DL} for /Users/uid/Downloads, or ${DOC} for /Users/uid/Documents, and/or ${SERVER1} for the UNC path //Server1/sub/dir, etc.

Relative path variables used in hyperlinks/shortcuts will be evaluated when opening the file links or exporting HTML contents to local file system; The following plugins support this feature:
Capture - Import directory tree, Import files as child items, and Share - Export CHM project, Export directory tree, Export HTML tree

Plugin: File - Maintenance - Apply relative path variables, which searches the current database for hyperlinks and shortcuts and attempts to apply relative path variables if applicable; This could be useful if you have previously inserted a lot of hyperlinks and/or shortcuts before this release.

Improvement: the option to determine if the default HTML content should go into edit mode when opening the info item, and another option to determine if attached HTML documents should go into edit mode when opening the documents inplace;
By default, the item's default HTML content goes into edit mode when opening, so you can edit the content in the HTML editor without having to manually toggle edit mode;
whereas attached HTML documents should stay in readonly mode to prevent accidental modifcations, as they're usually contents captured from the web or imported from file system, no editings are required in most of cases;
If in the case that you'd want to make changes to a few HTML documents, first open the documents and then right-click in the HTML editor and select 'Edit/rename' menu item to make it editable;
If this is not the case and you'd like to change the default behaviour, open the 'Options' dialog box and select the check boxes under the 'Content' tab;

Improvement: the context menu on database tabs with commands: New database, Open database, Close database, Close all databases, Close other databases

Improvement: an option to customize color of user interface; Select the View - Options menu item then pick a color for the user interface

Improvement: an option to customize color of database tabs; Right-click on the database Tabs and select the 'Tab color' menu item

Improvement: the integrated text viewer/editor comes with some more options/utilities, such as word-wrap, copy to clipboard, etc; and supports find-as-you-type, an option to keep and restore the font size; and a bugfix to replacements in text with empty string

Improvement: syntax-highlight: added MathLib keywords, constants and function calls; MathLib .m source files will also be rendered by syntax-highlighting when opening inplace, with a solution to resolve conflicts of .m suffix between objective-c and mathlib by detection of characteristic tags and syntax

Improvement: ability to change the database tab position by dragging-and-dropping the tabs

Improvement: ability to jump to the position/paragraph inside the document last visited when jumping back and forth between info items; Surely you can also define a bookmark to permanently save the position in the database

Improvement: keep focus in search results pane so you can select items by using the keyboard, and press Enter/Space to trigger the currenly selected item

Improvement: Capture - Import directory tree: for HTML documents, it also tries to import linked images from the accompanying sub folder (e.g. ./xxx_files), and skip the accompanying sub folder when recursively running into sub directories;
In addition, a bugfix to the javascript date/time garbage characters, and improvements with hyperlinks imported and formatted as HTML table

Improvement: Share - Export directory tree: it also handles shortcuts and file:// hyperlinks, and original documents linked with HTML contents if present will be copied into the target directory

Improvement: Capture - Import MS-Word documents: a smart way to imports accompanying images if any

Improvement: Share - Export CHM project: automatically decode embedded image data (BASE64) and save as image files, so the images can be viewed normally in CHM digital books without having to upgrade to the latest version of IE web browser

Improvement: Organize - Display statistics: it also gives the current item's location text and ssg-path info

Improvement: with in the outline view, press Ctlr+C to copy the selected item titles

Improvement: within the HTML editor, the scrollbar position can be restored when switching info items back

Improvement: Add attachments: for local HTML documents, it now imports accompanying images as attachments and alter image links accordingly to point to the attachments

Improvement: within the content header bar, a popup menu is displayed when clicking on the item title, to indicate the item's location info

Improvement: Copy link location: it copies the current URL text as well as a snippet of HTML containing the hyperlink, so it can be pasted as a hyperlink in other documents

Improvement: Copy (Ctrl+C or Command+C) now copies full HTML contents with accompanying images (if any) cached in a temporary folder, so you can paste the HTML contents in other documents without losing images; The cached images in temporary folder will be cleared at next copy operation, and the last one is automatically cleared at exit

Improvement: in the advanced search form, the Search button supports a popup menu, which gives some more options, and a list of recent searches, so you have the convenience of quickly running recnet queries without having to re-fill out the search form

Improvement: in the search results pane, clicking on the title text displays a popup menu, which lists the recent searches, clicking on the recent searches, it simply lists out the correcsponding results, so you have the conveneice of reviewing the recent search results without having to re-perform the searches

Improvement: when pasting plain text in the HTML editor, a string of blank spaces with the custom Tab width substitutes for the '\t' character

Improvement: in the advanced search form, added a checkbox for labels, and added the Search in results option, which allows to do a further search in the previous results list

Improvement: faster performance on searcing for partial words, it only searches the entries in range, instead of going through all entries in the database

Improvement: an option to determine if or not to show a decorative frame surrounding the associated calendar date within the outline view

Bugfix: URLs with percent encoding not correctly decoded while indexing/searching

Bugfix: Capture - Import files as child items, it may fail to import accompanying images in sub-directories containing special characters

Bugfix: certain dialog boxes not activated when a secondary dialog box exits; This usually happened after picking files or folders

Bugfix: Copy link address not working on Mac

Bugfix: in the Undelete items dialog box, the 'trash' icon not shown correctly in the description

Bugfix: current changes in HTML editor not precedingly saved before performing export-sepcific operations; Note that almost all exporting plugins retrieve data from the database storage instead of current views

Bugfix: Share - Export CHM/HtmlTree: attempts to get rid of scripts from HTML contents in case of conflicts and incompatibility

JSAPI: CLocalFile::saveText(str, codec); for saving text in UTF8/16/32 or any other supported charset/MiB

JSAPI: added plugin.deferDeleteFile() and platform.deferDeleteFile(), to schedule temporary file deletions; The former schedules a file deletion at the plugin completes, while the rear at the application exits

Added: the 'Format brush' feature which enables to handily apply text style from current selection to another part of text contents, like using a paint brush; A mouse click on the 'Format brush' tool button to use it once, double-click to keep it active

Added: an option to enable using file system icons for outline items (the drive icon for root items, folder icon for branches and file icon for leaf items); Or the default/inbuilt 'cube' icon is selected for info items, and the default icon is loaded from the image file './images/ico_infoitem.png'

Added: support of cross-database hyperlinks, which allows to make hyperlinks to info items saved in different .nyf databases; It's required to first have target databases open before making cross-db hyperlinks

Added: backward compatibility for hyperlinks created within earlier version 5.x

Enhancement: new algorithm to allocate unique IDs for each info items, to help the DB-Merge utility to resolve/avoid conflicts

Enhancement: in the hyperink eidting dialog box, bookmarks will be listed in a separate window, that substitutes for the popup menu, as menu items scrolls up/down slower;

Bugfix: v5.x legacy hyperlinks not working

Bugfix: bookmarks not working with new/empty info items

Bugfix: corrections to the default focus policy within confirmation popup windows, the 'Yes' button has initial focus for Save-specific operations, and the 'No or Cancel' has initial focus for Deletion-specific operations

Bugfix: shortcuts not working when exporting attachments

Bugfix: the plugin 'Export text without formatting' not working

Bugfix: trashed items may not be listed in Undelete mode if no any other sibling items existing

Bugfix: in the HTML editor, changes not saved when loading image gallery

Bugfix: on the main toolbar, shortcut keys not shown in the native format on Mac OS X

Bugfix: defnote/attachments not matched on searching index+labels

Bugfix: in the image gallery mode, screen may flash when switching over to another picture

Bugfix: in the image gallery mode, no more than 12 images shown in the left side bar

Bugfix: in the hyperlink editing dialog box, the OK button is not enabled after editing the hyperlink

Bugfix: in the HTML editor, pasting plain text containing special characters (U+0085, U+2028, U+2029) not working

Minor fixes/tweaks/changes

Version 7.0.0 Beta-21

Plugin: Custom search scope

Plugin: Custom page margin

Plugin: Open folder location of shortcuts

Improvement: enabled to open attached documents externally with the original file names

Improvement: options to customize default paragraph attributes

Improvement: enabled to center an info item on opening from the Query-results or Item-links pane

Improvement: enabled the outline to auto-scroll when dragging info items over the edge of the view

Improvement: allows to drag Query results and drop into the outline view, to make item links

Improvement: allows to customize the main menu bar; Sub menus can be put onto the main menu bar

Improvement: for Windows, the keyboard_shortcuts.ini can be preserved while re-installing; for Linux/Mac, the keyboard shortcut settings will be saved in the user's HOME directory

Improvement: for Linux/Mac, the config file (.myBase7.ini) will be saved in the user's HOME directory, so all the configurations can be retained when reinstalling new versions; Nevertheless, the command line parameter '-portable' forces myBase to load/save configurations from/in the program's install folder instead, so it can be running as a portable version from USB sticks

Improvement: for Mac, the new UI style is applied to the main tool bar and tool buttons